Reentering the Tunnel of Love

by Conroy

“There's a crazy mirror showing us both in 5-d / I’m laughing at you, you're laughing at me / There's a room of shadows that gets so dark brother / It’s easy for two people to lose each other, in this tunnel of love”
– Bruce Springsteen, “Tunnel of Love”

Bruce Springsteen surely ranks as one of the most successful and admired musicians of the rock era.¹ His career has been a rare combination of immense popularity and critical adulation, and he’s been doing it for 40 years. In fact it’s the very scope of his career and the enduring airplay of his biggest hit songs (not to mention his reputation as a colossus of arena-rock), that can obscure the fact that Springsteen was capable of startling artistic turns. It’s been 25 years since one of these turns when he released what has become an overlooked album, a forgotten masterpiece, Tunnel of Love.

Ask fans or critics to identify Springsteen’s best album and they’re likely to say Born to Run, Born in the U.S.A. or even The River. Few, I suspect, would choose Tunnel of Love. Springsteen developed a pattern of alternating between “big” accessible albums with smaller more intimate ones. He followed Born to Run (1975) with the darker Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978); The River (1980) with the down-right bleak Nebraska (1982).

But Springsteen roared back after that album, becoming a rock god, The Boss, after releasing the immensely successful album Born in the U.S.A. (1984)² and enjoying its immensely successful follow-up tour. Born in the U.S.A. was, among other things, an anthemic and exciting album. That’s why it sold so well. And naturally there was tremendous anticipation for the follow-up. When he delivered Tunnel of Love in 1987, I doubt many fans could have anticipated the sound or subject matter. Rather than traffic in the same blend of power rock, Springsteen did a 180, turning inward and stripping his music down, almost entirely removing the E Street Band from the recording sessions. He turned from the social and political to the personal and introspective. It’s a startling 12 tracks.³

Above and beyond anything else, Tunnel of Love is an album about love and doubt and marriage and disappointment. Or what I like to term a divorce album. Befitting its subject matter, the music is mostly subdued and lyrics dwell on failed marriage and love. While this may seem like a recipe for dour listening, Springsteen’s evocative lyrics paint stark pictures and his music while stripped down remains haunting. In many ways the album is a cousin to U2’s Achtung Baby, which is also a divorce album, and no less compelling for it.

I think you have to be a little careful when considering autobiography in an artist’s work, but in the case of Tunnel of Love, Springsteen’s personal life may well have inspired his art. He married actress Julianne Phillips in 1985 during the Born in the U.S.A. tour. A newly married man in his mid-30s, a mature Springsteen seemed to find disappointment instead of happiness. And it’s hard not to connect an album full of tracks about failed love with the experience of his recent marriage. Consider that it was during the Tunnel of Love tour ⁴ that he separated from Phillips and began his relationship with E Street Band back-up singer Patti Scialfa.⁵

This personal history is worth remembering when listening to the album. Here’s a track-by-track review:

“Ain’t Got You” sets the albums tone with Springsteen’s arrhythmic, country-twinged vocals backed by a spare guitar. The lyrics focus on a musician, indistinguishable from Springsteen, awash in wealth, luck, and luxury, but lacking love. The opening verse says it all:

“I got a fortune of heaven in diamonds and gold / I got all the bonds baby that the bank could hold / I got houses 'cross the country honey end to end / And everybody buddy wants to be my friend / Well I got all the riches honey any man every knew / But the only thing I ain't got honey I ain't got you.”

Tougher Than the Rest and All That Heaven Will Allow
The song is clever and a bit funny, and its longing leads directly to the second—and standout—track, “Tougher Than the Rest.” A slow ballad backed by an insistent drum-bass line and a mild synthesizer drone (this is still a mid-80s album after all) the lyrics show hope for true love: “Well if you’re looking for love / Honey I’m tougher than the rest.” But a hope full of compromise:

“Well ’round here baby / I learned you get what you can get / So if you’re rough enough for love / Honey I’m tougher than the rest,” and “Well it ain’t no secret / I’ve been around a time or two / Well I don’t know baby maybe you’ve been around too / Well there’s another dance / All you gotta do is say yes.”

“All That Heaven Will Allow” carries on much in the same musical and lyrical vein, but the compromise isn’t with love, but with circumstance. This is the last time on the album that belief in love triumphs over all: “Rain and storm and dark skies / Well now they don’t mean a thing / If you got a girl that loves you / And who wants to wear your ring.”


Spare Parts, Cautious Man, and Walk Like a Man
The albums falls from its tenuous hope on the next three tracks. “Spare Parts,” a country-rocker that tells the story of a man who runs out on his pregnant fiancé. “Cautious Man,” the album’s sparest track, is a somber ballad of a loner who battles his demons and his desire to walk away from his wife. Then there is “Walk Like a Man,” another slow ballad, that sounds like a message to Springsteen’s father conveys the sentimentality and hope attached to marriage:

“I remember ma draggin’ me and my sister up the street to the church / Whenever she heard those wedding bells / Well would they ever look so happy again / The handsome groom and his bride / As they stepped into that long black limousine / For their mystery ride.”

Tunnel of Love
Having firmly established a grim and soul-addled mood, Springsteen speeds up the music with one of the album’s best tracks, “Tunnel of Love.” The title track is awash in synthesizer (it’s easily the most musically robust track) and jangling guitar. It also introduces the albums central metaphor, comparing love and relationships to a funhouse ride, it’s worth quoting at length:

“Fat man sitting on a little stool / Takes the money from my hand while his eyes take a walk all over you / Hands me the ticket smiles and whispers good luck / Cuddle up angel cuddle up my little dove / Well ride down baby into this tunnel of love/

I can feel the soft silk of your blouse / And them soft thrills in our little fun house / Then the lights go out and it's just the three of us / You me and all that stuff were so scared of / Gotta ride down baby into this tunnel of love/

There's a crazy mirror showing us both in 5-d / I’m laughing at you you're laughing at me / There's a room of shadows that gets so dark brother / It’s easy for two people to lose each other in this tunnel of love/

It ought to be easy ought to be simple enough / Man meets woman and they fall in love / But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough / And you’ve got to learn to live with what you can't rise above if you want to ride on down in through this tunnel of love.”

Prometheus and the Alien Saga: Revisited

by Conroy

A few months ago I posted on the then upcoming film Prometheus and how it may or may not relate to the Alien movie franchise. While I was excited to see a film where director Ridley Scott went back to the “Alien universe”, I was nervous that Prometheus might fail to live up to Alien or Aliens or even undermine some of the mystery that was crucial to the first film. Now having actually seen Prometheus and having thought about it for a few days, I can discuss what the film does and doesn’t accomplish.

[SPOILER ALERT…CRITICAL DETAILS ABOUT PROMETHEUS FOLLOW]

Prometheus and the Alien Universe
The story of Prometheus “exists”, without question, within the Alien universe [1]. For instance, in Prometheus a science mission travels far across space to a moon (LV-223) in search of the “Engineers” a humanoid species apparently worshipped several millennia ago by primitive cultures all over Earth. The Engineers turn out to be the Space Jockey species glimpsed aboard the derelict spacecraft in Alien. And the spacecraft of the Engineers is of the same design as the Space Jockey ship seen in Alien. The humans are soon confronted with a host of creatures that share characteristics with the iconic alien, including an unremitting hostility, caustic blood, and a terrifying lifecycle. There is even a xenomorph-like [2] creature “born” at the end of the film. One of the more interesting aspects of the Alien movies was the existence of androids and their relationship to humans. Prometheus continues this, and indeed one of its most interesting characters, David portrayed excellently by Michael Fassbender, is an android whose nuanced but company-first behavior hints strongly of the android Ash in Alien. And while I'm on characters, Prometheus continues the Alien franchise’s tradition of strong female leads, this time with Noomi Rapace playing Elizabeth Shaw as a scientist turned survivor.

Beyond these direct connections between Prometheus and the Alien movies, there are the stylistic and thematic similarities. Like all Ridley Scott movies Prometheus is wonderfully rendered, but it maintains the dark tones and sharp division between dirty grays, browns, and blacks, and crisp almost sterile whites that are such hallmarks of the Alien movies. This isn’t to say that there isn’t ample color in the movie (there certainly is, especially inside of the ship Prometheus) but the movie more or less adheres to the color palette established by Scott in Alien. Perhaps the most incongruous thing is that Prometheus in 2012 includes a vision of late-21^st-century technology (holographic survey models, advanced smart-phone/iPad like computers, robotic surgical capsules, etc.) that were entirely (and intentionally) absent from Alien in 1979, a story which ostensibly takes place long after the events in the later film [3].

David, the complicated android

Many of Prometheus’s themes align with Alien and Aliens. In general, the Alien universe is a hostile place. Individuals like Ripley and the other major characters have few or no friends, love is distant or hidden, trust is fleeting, and ultimately, survival becomes the entire focus of Ripley and those around her. These themes, along with others, are all front and center in Prometheus. In the purest sense of the word Prometheus isn’t a prequel to Alien, the end of Prometheus does not lead to the beginning of Alien or even demand that the story ultimately get there. But it is a movie that takes place in the Alien universe sometime before the events of the first film.

Unanswered Questions
Prometheus is a thoughtful film in that is raises questions about the creation of man in an original way. The film suggests and then later seems to confirm that humans were created not in the image of God (at least not directly) but in the image of the Engineers, an advanced extraterrestrial species. Following clues unearthed in archeological finds all over Earth, a team of scientists determines that the Engineers came from a distant star system invisible to early man, and interprets this as a message from the Engineers to find them when man is ready [4]. A scientific expedition funded and directed by the Weyland corporation [5] travels to the star system in the hopes of finding the Engineers and gaining answers to some of the eternal questions that have haunted man throughout history. Where did we come from? Who made us? Where are we going?

The expedition arrives at moon LV-223 only, seemingly, to find a long abandoned station with no living Engineers left. However, like the eggs in Alien, things inside the station are in fact dormant, not dead. As events unfold it becomes clear that the station isn’t a place to find answers but a place entirely toxic – hostile, to hammer home a theme of the Alien universe – to humans. And the Engineers aren’t interested in teaching man but seem to have been planning for man’s eradication. The original questions remain unanswered and many more arise. Why are the Engineers ready to eliminate the human species? Where are they really from? What went wrong at this “dead” station?

Readers of this blog will know that I like this type of uncertainty and unknowing. The more I study the universe the weirder and more indifferent to humanity it seems [6]. Questions of man’s origin, be it God or nature or the product of alien Engineers, should be left obscured in art so they can better reflect the obscurity of reality. Several reviewers have criticized Prometheus for leaving too many unanswered questions, a point-of-view that I fundamentally disagree with. Humans have learned so much in the last several thousand years, but there is vastly more that we don’t know. I appreciate a movie like Prometheus that asks a lot of big questions and shows us an original idea but that doesn’t pretend to have an insight on all the secrets of the universe.
 

The Ultimate Map

by Conroy

One of the first books my parents gave to me as a child was an atlas, a gift that I credit with kindling my life-long fascination with world geography. I loved the bright color maps of countries and regions I hadn’t even heard the names of before. I studied the accompanying photographs, charts, and statistics with great intensity. After that first atlas I couldn’t get enough, wallpapering my bedroom with the maps that came in National Geographic magazines, getting new and bigger atlases [1], and memorizing lists of the largest islands, longest rivers, most populous cities, etc. I think this all appealed to me because atlases and maps provide one way to imagine and relate to the rest of the world. Maybe it was this early childhood exposure, but for me the world is organized in my head as one big map, and everything else, cultures, languages, histories, places, current events, and even some memories, are just layers to be accessed from this underlying picture. Is this the way you think?

I’ve explained geography to others as having two fundamental components: (1) the physical reality of our world, like the oceans, great rivers, and high mountain ranges, and (2) the relationship of one place to another, like how Great Britain is separated from mainland Europe by the narrow English Channel. These fundamental components are, well, fundamentally important to the long development of human civilization and the common facts of everyday experience. San Francisco has its remarkably consistent temperatures because of its location on a peninsula adjacent to the Northern Pacific and the cool California Current that flows along America’s west coast. Great Britain avoided invasion in World War II because Hitler’s war machine lacked the naval craft to cross the 20-mile wide Straight of Dover. India and China border one another but their civilizations have little in common because they’re physically separated by the highest mountain range on Earth. Geography is central to these facts. The story of history and the interactions of civilization are substantially informed by the geographical relations of people and places; that’s what the term geopolitics means. And the facts of everyday life, the language you speak, the weather you experience, the types of outdoor activities you participate in are inextricably linked to geography.

The wonderfully stylized London Underground map

Anyway, for me, it’s the results of geography, the histories and cultures and climates and sights, which make maps, our most basic visualization of geography, so endlessly interesting.  In fact, my girlfriend finds it amusing that even now whenever I’m confronted with a map I can’t resist studying it with terrific focus. And maps are more than functional tools, they can also be art. A few years ago the Walter’s Art Museum in Baltimore had a wonderful exhibit on maps. It included ancient tapestries of the then known world to the modern stylized depiction of the London Underground system. And it’s hard to not appreciate the clarity and simple beauty of the London Underground system map or the wonderful detail and color of the (very best, in my opinion) road maps provided by companies like ADC [2].

An ADC road map of Washington, D.C.

A Mapping Revolution
There’s only one drawback to traditional maps – they’re static. Any given map is set at one scale and depicts just one area (even if it’s the whole world). You need an entire book (an atlas) to show maps of different locations, details, and data, and that still doesn’t allow for reader configuration of the format or content. But the internet, smart phones, and the massive proliferation of information is changing all that, and more interestingly, proposed enhancements from Google and Apple might take maps to their fullest expression.

Starting in the 1990s Mapquest and other sites began to offer digital maps, usually for road directions. I didn’t care for these maps because you could only see an area the size of your computer monitor and the maps themselves were rather dull to view. But when Google Maps came out in the early 2000s the aesthetics began to improve and over time they have added important enhancement like an ability to scroll across the entire globe, zoom in an out for greater or less detail, and new layers providing satellite imagery and terrain.

Google’s companion Google Earth application added the ability to change perspective and included 3-D buildings in major cities. Later Google added Street View shots taken from cars mounted with cameras providing 360 degree views that let you actually see – not imagine – what a place looks like. This is a massive shift, converting a map to a far more sensory and immediate experience. Now it’s possible to view, say, the streets of Rome without ever having traveled there. Certainly this is no substitute for actually being there in person, but it does bring views of places all over the world right onto your computer screen.

Other functions allow you to toggle on features like up-to-date traffic information, user photos, labels, and links to Wikipedia articles. And this doesn’t even touch on the powerful linking of maps with GPS, which shows you just where you are and can direct you to just where you’re going, anyplace and anytime. Now Google has announced that they plan to add even more functionality to their maps, including more 3-D buildings and street view shots taken by pedestrians of places where cars can’t go, allowing a user to view cities as if they were in a helicopter, or see nature along hiking trails from thousands of miles away.

These changes have been added incrementally over the last decade so you might not realize just how incredible they really are. No longer are maps 2-D static views limited to a specified area and providing limited information. Google Maps, and probably Apple’s soon to be released map application, provide users a map or satellite photo of any place on the globe, street-level views along a growing network of roads and soon along non-road areas of interest, links to encyclopedia articles, and access to real-time information like traffic conditions or the proximity of coffee shops. And you can do it all from you mobile phone. Enhanced views, more information, and real-time data; that is a mapping revolution.

I wrote above that in my mind I view the world as a large map with much of my knowledge and experience layered onto the underlying structure. Aren’t these new and improving interactive digital maps getting closer and closer to this mental image? The more functionality that is added, the more information is linked, the closer we get to a version of a map that I could have only dreamed of as a child.

Maps as Art

If there is one area where static maps still beat their digital cousins is in presentation. Static maps, done well, are far more visually appealing than Google Maps or any other product available on the internet. There will be no museum exhibits showcasing digital maps (at least not in their current form). And there is an inherent limitation to maps that are restricted to showing only an area the size of a computer monitor or the even more restrictive smart phone screen. I have little doubt that Google and Apple will continue to improve the visual presentation of their map programs, but who can say if they’ll ever be as good as a printed version. I still have a large map of the United States hanging on my home office wall and I still find myself studying it from time to time. Next to my office desk are several atlases and I do occasionally pick them up and flip through their pages. But it’s to the computer I mainly turn for maps now. The functionality of digital maps is just too useful. Hopefully one day the style will match the substance, and then we might really have the ultimate map.

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NOTES:

[1] Including an old one my uncle had from the late 50s that included a lot of post-World War II/early Cold War names and notations and anachronisms like Japan regaining full sovereignty after the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco or South Africa still ruling Namibia (or Southwest Africa as labeled).

[2] Whose motto is “The Map People.”

Hurricane Guesswork

by Conroy

This past week tropical storm Alberto churned off the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas, ushering in an early start to the Atlantic hurricane season [1]. For residents along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the hurricane season is a period of low-grade angst. There’s a relatively remote chance that coastal areas will be hammered by a truly devastating storm, but it happens. Since 1950 there have occurred, on average, 11 named storms [2], 6 hurricanes [3], and 3 major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher [4]), per year. A fraction of these, one or two hurricanes each year on average, will hit the U.S. mainland. And rarely, maybe once or twice a decade, a major hurricane makes landfall with catastrophic results, as witnessed by the deaths and damage caused by Camille, Hugo, Andrew, and Katrina, to name only the most prominent.

Recognizing the danger of hurricanes, it’s without question important to identify and follow every tropical depression as it forms, predict its storm track, warn people living in potentially affected areas as far in advance as possible, and prepare for emergency response as warranted. The news media and various local, state, and federal public agencies do the first three very well. Sadly, as vividly demonstrated by Katrina, emergency response can sometimes be hindered by bureaucratic obstacles and lack of initiative.

Hurricane Forecasting
The interest in hurricanes also leads to far more dubious types of planning and forecasting, namely the annual Atlantic Seasonal Hurricane Forecast. The most prominent of these is published as part of the Tropical Meteorology Project of Colorado State University [5], which was previously led by Professor William Gray and is now led by Professor Philip Klotzbach.

Gray and Klotzbach will explain that they use Atlantic and Pacific water temperatures, global weather patterns like El Nino and La Nina, and other climate factors to predict hurricane activity and probabilities for strikes in the Caribbean and North America. For example, this year’s forecast (from April) predicts a relatively quiet season with a total of ten named storms (tropical storms or hurricanes), four hurricanes, and two major hurricanes.  In addition, it places the probability of a hurricane making landfall somewhere along the U.S. coast at 42%.

Call me a skeptic, but I doubt the ability of anyone to accurately predict the number and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes, let alone the location of where they might develop and track, for any given season. Meteorologists can’t predict the weather for any one location with much accuracy even a week in advance. How can they predict the development of major weather systems over huge expanses of the equatorial and North Atlantic many months ahead of time (the Atlantic hurricane season usually peaks in early- to mid-September)? Add to that the fact that the dynamics of hurricane (or any tropical cyclone) formation are not entirely understood and the various factors that lead to hurricanes are specific to local weather conditions and cannot be predicted in advance.

Yet predictions are made each year, and each year they are given mention in the news. For that reason, Gray’s and Klotzbach’s forecasts deserve to be tested for their accuracy.

Bad Predictions
One way to check whether forecasts have any predictive value is to examine how previous forecasts have aligned with actual hurricane activity. This table summarizes predicted versus actual Atlantic hurricane activity from 1999 (the first year of Gray and Klotzbach forecast data available on-line) through 2011.

Still Searching for the Great American Novel

by Conroy

I’m slowly making my way through the American literary cannon, a book at a time, in search of the elusive Great American Novel. I just completed David Foster Wallace’s massive tome, Infinite Jest, one of the more recent nominees for this title [1]. At over 1,000 pages (included over 90 pages of footnotes [2]) Wallace’s dense and multi-layered story certainly has the size of an epic. But his semi-parodic near future America and focus on a Boston tennis academy, the residents of an adjacent halfway house, wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists, and an illicit movie so entertaining that it’s lethal to all viewers is in my mind a bit too idiosyncratic [3] to fit the bill as the Great American Novel. But what does fit the bill?

In concept, the Great American Novel is a title given to the novel, written by an American, which best encapsulates the American Experience, the spirit of the nation and the people, or better described by borrowing a term from German, the work that captures the zeitgeist of America. It’s the American equivalent of the national epic; America’s Les Miserables, Ulysses, or War and Peace. There’s no shortage of candidates for the title; here’s a shortlist (in chronological order):

• Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1852),
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1885),
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925),
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929),
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939),
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951),
• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Below (1953),
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov (1955),
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960),
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973),
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985), and
• Underworld by Don Delillo (1997) [4].

Many of these books sit on my bookshelf, and many of them were rich rewarding reads, and certainly each captures a portion of the American Experience. For instance, in Moby Dick [5] there is the struggle of democracy, equality, and power, which echoes American pre-Civil War struggles with slavery; in Blood Meridian we are shown in stark tones  the violence that accompanied the settling of the American West; The Grapes of Wrath explores the crushing poverty of the Great Depression; and Underworld gives us lives lived in the low heat of the Cold War during the last half of the twentieth century.

But like the still view of a photograph each of these novels and all the others listed above can at best only capture a facet or a few facets of America, a limited angle, nuances and not the whole. After all America is too large, with a huge diverse population drawn from all over the world, and a history and culture too sprawling to ever be captured by one writer in one novel no matter how kaleidoscopic the story or how broad the cast of characters. And the same could be written about the efforts of a single filmmaker or historian or journalist. But this isn’t meant to diminish the writers (and other chroniclers) that attempt great novels or reach to express what America means. In fact I much admire the ambition of writers that yearn to express the soul of America even if the best they can achieve is partial success.

Whenever I think on novels and literature I always fall back to James Joyce and Ulysses because I’ve never read anything better. Joyce set out to write an Irish national epic and perhaps he succeeded (it’s worth keeping in mind that Ireland is a much smaller country than the United States), but what really speaks to me when reading Ulysses isn’t the Irish elements. Instead, when I strip away the structural and stylistic flourishes and place the literary, philosophic, and religious (and many other) correspondences in perspective, I find the most alive book I’ve ever read. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, Stephan Daedalus, Molly Bloom, and what seems to be the whole population of Dublin come alive through their thoughts, emotions, motivations, memories, physical urges, biases, their interactions with each other, and their shared histories. Ulysses takes place over less than 24 hours, but it gives us the fullest glimpse of life and lives of any fiction I’ve read or watched or listened to [6]. Scholars and academics may be kept busy dissecting Joyce's techniques and allusions, but for me it’s the life of the novel that makes it important and worthwhile.

And indeed, while I can say pretty emphatically that Wallace’s Infinite Jest is not the Great American Novel, it is a book teeming with truths. Wallace’s collection of tennis prodigies, recovering (and not recovering) alcoholics and drug addicts, terrorists and government agents, and everyone they interact with, is vivid and bursting with life. At the core, after you’ve taken his weird future in stride, Wallace’s characters struggle with what it means to be a family, to make and sustain human connections, and to cope with the burden of being alive. It’s his take on the plight of what he considers to be the sad post-Cold War generations and our collective need to find some distraction, be it drugs or entertainment or sexual conquests, from the day-to-day struggle. And his remarkably fluid writing style (the words seem to have flowed onto the page from his mind), massive vocabulary (Wallace makes you keep your dictionary close), and talent for perfectly expressing detail (that tool that all great novelists must have) make Infinite Jest a first-rate and worthy read [7].

I’ve always believed that great artists, and especially novelists, are better equipped to describe the workings of the mind, from our motivations and emotions and rationalizations to our physical cravings and how we perceive the world, than science or religion or philosophy. Novelists like Joyce and Wallace offer insights into what is means to be human. As the great critic Harold Bloom noted, reading a novel isn’t going to make you a better person, but hopefully reading a great novel will provide at least a tiny explanation of life. If an author can do that, he or she has achieved a great success.

So I’ll continue searching for the Great American Novel. I doubt I’ll ever find one book that expresses all that “America” means or is, but I am certain that what I will find is even more important, glimpses of truth and life. That’s all we can seek from any art.

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NOTES:

[1] Infinite Jest was published in 1996, when Wallace was just 33-years-old.

[2] Anyone familiar with Wallace’s writing, fiction and non-fiction alike, knows of his very effective use of footnotes, which I must admit is a bit of an inspiration for my own notes.

[3] This is but the barest synopsis of Infinite Jest, which is rich in characters, sub-plots, themes, and exquisite detail.

[4] And this list could be expanded to include Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Robert Penn Warren’s All the Kings Men (1946), Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1953), Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), John Updike’s Rabbit series, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy (1938), and Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902), to name but a few.

[5] A work I must admit that I don’t particularly care for.

[6] I’ll be returning to discuss Ulysses much more fully in future posts.

[7] After reading the novel and Wallace’s descriptions of the crushing weight, the unendurable weight, of clinical depression, it is less of a surprise that he killed himself in 2008. He suffered from depression all his life and eventually the medications stopped working for him. It’s deeply sad and will deprive us of any more work from this gifted American writer. He left behind not only Infinite Jest but a large collection of entertaining, informative, and incisive essays and non-fiction pieces along with a couple of short story collections and a couple of other novels (the last of which, The Pale King, was unfinished upon his death and published posthumously).

The Heart of the Season

by Conroy

I last wrote about tennis three months ago after Novak Djokovic defeated Rafael Nadal in the longest grand slam final [1] in tennis history to claim his third Australian Open title. That result was a continuation of last year when Djokovic won in Melbourne and went on to dominate the season, claiming titles in just about every tournament he played through the U.S. Open, winning three grand slams, ten titles overall, and defeating Rafael Nadal six times along the way [2].

But 2012 isn’t turning out to be another 2011. Novak Djokovic remains number 1, but 2012 hasn’t started out as another year of dominance. Instead, the top three players – Djokovic, Nadal, and Roger Federer – have amassed remarkably similar results:

Player	2012 Record	Win %	Grand Slam Titles	Masters 1000 Titles	Other Titles
1.    Novak Djokovic	24-3	0.888	1	1	0
2.    Rafael Nadal	27-3	0.900	0	1	1
3.    Roger Federer	23-3	0.885	0	1	2

Djokovic has the big crown with his hard won Australian Open title, but each of the three men have claimed one of three Masters 1000 titles played this spring, and Nadal and Federer have picked up additional titles [3]. They’re records are strikingly similar with each man losing just three matches through the first four months of the season (which makes Djokovic’s run last year, where he didn’t lose his third match until mid-September, all the more remarkable). What’s more, of their nine combined losses, four have been to each other [4].

These results tell me two things: (1) the top-3 men remain head and shoulders above the rest of the tour, certainly when it comes to the winning the big matches, and (2) as we head into the heart of the tennis season, the race for number 1 in 2012 is very much up for grabs.

We’ve reached the start of four frantic months of major tournaments, starting with the Masters 1000 events in Madrid and Rome and followed by the grand slams at Roland Garros and Wimbledon. Then after a very brief respite there will be the London Olympics [5], the Canada and Cincinnati Masters 1000 events, and finally the U.S. Open.

Last year, with the notable exception of Roland Garros [6], this stretch belonged to Djokovic, where he won five of the seven major tournaments played, including Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, and claimed the number 1 ranking. What will this same stretch bring this year? I don’t make predictions, but I foresee a few possibilities (listed from most to least probable):

Djokovic Retains the Number 1 Ranking

One perspective would hold that Djokovic has nowhere to go but down. After winning so much last year anything less than a repeat performance would see him bleed rankings points and come back to Nadal and Federer. And indeed, if Djokovic fails to win at least one of the three grand slams this summer (and probably one or two of the other big tournaments) he’ll likely lose his top ranking.

However, the bottom line is the Serb has won the biggest tournament played this year (Australian Open) and arguably the most prestigious tournament after the grand slams (Miami). He lost in the finals of Monte Carlo to Nadal and the semi-finals of Indian Wells to an inspired John Isner. These results don’t indicate someone who has lost their focus or game. In my mind he’s a 50-50 bet to win Roland Garros, and believe me he’ll be focused and motivated in Paris a month from now as he goes for the career grand slam and four consecutive grand slam titles [7]. The same can be said for Wimbledon and he’s a clear favorite at the U.S. Open. Djokovic has a lot to defend, but there are not enough reasons to think he'll fail to win enough to stay at the top of the rankings and add to his grand slam title count.

Nadal Regains the Number 1 Ranking
It’s unsurprising that Rafael Nadal regained his winning ways once he got back on red clay, triumphing dominantly in his last two tournaments at Monte Carlo and Barcelona (for the eighth and seventh time, respectively). He beat Djokovic for the first time since 2010 at Monte Carlo (a result this writer predicted – I have witnesses), which got a huge monkey off his back and has to give him a lot of confidence heading to Roland Garros. I predict (okay, sometimes I make predictions) that Nadal and Djokovic will play again in the next couple of weeks at either Madrid or Rome, and if Nadal can backup his Monte Carlo win then he’ll have to be considered the favorite to win at Roland Garros for a record seventh time.

Unfortunately for Nadal, winning a Roland Garros won’t get him back to the top of the rankings. The Spaniard will have to overcome the Serb (and Federer) at Wimbledon or the U.S. Open. Nadal can do it, he’s a hell of a competitor and he’s won both tournaments before. Still, beating Djokovic on a really big stage is something Nadal will have to re-prove. He has the ignominious distinction of being the only man to lose three consecutive grand slam finals, all to Djokovic of course. Until he turns that around, he won’t be reclaiming the top ranking.

Federer Regains the Number 1 Ranking

The casual fan may not realize that after last year’s U.S. Open the player with the best record, most tournament titles, and whose accumulated the most rankings points is Roger Federer (40-3, 6 titles, 4,855). The 30-year-old is off to his best start since 2007 – when he was still the dominant number 1 – and he will have his opportunity to get back to number 1 this summer. But to do it he’ll have to overcome Djokovic and/or Nadal at two of the three grand slams. Winning one grand slam almost certainly won’t be good enough.

Federer can do this, but he’s been utterly unable to solve Nadal at Roland Garros, losing to him there five times in the last seven years (keep in mind that his one Roland Garros title in 2009 came when he didn’t have to play Nadal). I don’t see that changing this year. And Federer might have to beat both Djokovic and Nadal, which on slow clay at this point in time seems like too tall a task. So then to get back to number 1 Federer would have to win both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. I think this is possible, he’s been just as good as Nadal and Djokovic at the U.S. Open the last couple of years (holding match points against the Serb in the semi-finals each of the last two years), and if he plays well at Wimbledon he can add to his collection of six winner’s trophies. The problem is that his two rivals are playing just too well. Federer has a decent chance to win one grand slam but winning two will be very difficult. He might be back at number 1 come September, but it’s a long shot.

The Long Fall of John Goodman

by Conroy

John Goodman on trial

If you’re intrigued by sensational courtroom drama involving the lurid details of the rich and famous, you’ll be fascinated by the recent trial of John Goodman, polo tycoon, founder of the International Polo Club Palm Beach, and popular playboy [1].

In the foggy dark early morning hours of February 12, 2010 Goodman was driving his $200,000 black Bentley along the quiet west county roads near Wellington, Florida. Driving recklessly in low-visibility Goodman ran a stop sign and violently struck a Hyundai driven by 23-year-old engineering student Scott Wilson. The impact was so violent that it knocked Wilson’s car from the road and into an adjacent canal. Wilson trapped in his car, drowned. His Bentley badly damaged from the crash, Goodman left the scene on foot.

He called 9-1-1, an hour later, from the mobile home of a nearby resident. The medical examiner noted that the long delay between the accident and the 9-1-1 call sealed Wilson’s fate. The recording of Goodman’s call (listen here), indicates that he (1) knew he had been in a car accident, (2) it was his fault, and (3) he sounds confused like he’s drunk but trying not to sound drunk. When he was finally arrested hours after the accident his blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit. A sensational legal battle was about to begin.

Goodman hired famed high-powered Miami defense attorney Roy Black, whose previous clients include physician William Kennedy Smith [2], radio host Rush Limbaugh, and actor Kelsey Grammer, and who’s frequently appeared on TV as a legal commentator. He pleaded not guilty to the charges of DUI manslaughter and vehicular homicide. Then, in order to shield his considerable fortune from the civil lawsuits that would surely be filed by the Wilson family, he legally adopted his 42-year-old girlfriend in the fall of 2011. He immediately gave her a portion of the $300 million trust he had set up for his two biological children. A family scrabble was bound the ensue, and sure enough his two teenaged kids filed suit in February attempting the have the adoption thrown out so they could maintain sole beneficiaries of the fortune.

Goodman's (top) and Wilson's (bottom) mangled cars

Once the trial began, Black presented the following defense. Earlier in the evening Goodman attended two events, the first at the White Horse Tavern and the second at the Players Club [3], where bar tabs show he ordered many rounds of vodka and tequila. According to the testimony of friends, including polo player Ignacio “Nacho” Figueras [4], he bought most of the drinks for others and was not intoxicated when he left the Players Club. Goodman then drove his car in search of a Wendy’s for a late night frosty. Approaching the intersection where the accident would occur, Goodman’s vehicle suddenly malfunctioned and despite his best efforts to stop the car it accelerated forward through the intersection. He then struck something, banging his head in the process. He didn’t know what he had hit and when he got out of his car to investigate he didn’t see another car or person. The accident had left him dazed and confused and his cell phone had died. So he wandered off in search of help and nursing an injured wrist and ribs. He soon saw a light down the road coming from an open barn door. He went inside in search of a phone, which he didn’t find but he did see a bottle of liquor. He drank from the bottle hoping the alcohol would alleviate his “excruciating [physical] pain”. Then he left the barn, spotted the light of a nearby trailer and called 9-1-1 using the owner’s phone. That was Black's explanation for the delay in calling 9-1-1 and the elevated blood-alcohol level.

On a believability scale with 1 representing the unvarnished as-God-is-my-witness recounting of events and 10 being a preposterously unbelievable fabrication, Goodman’s explanation of events rates at about a 13. The jury agreed and on March 23 of this year – more than two years after the accident – Goodman was found guilty of DUI manslaughter and vehicular homicide; he faces up to 30 years in prison [5]. Roy Black has claimed jury misconduct, but that charge has been rejected by the court, though further arguments on this point are set to be heard on April 30. Sentencing will likely occur in early May.

The Perfect Climate - Part 5

by Conroy

Rio, unsurprisingly, has one of the best climates in the world

I spent the first four parts of this series exploring my climate ranking system and applying it to American cities in search of the "perfect climate". Now it’s time to expand the rankings to the whole world. Below I’ve ranked 150 cities [1] using both my original formula, which favors warm places, and the alternative formula presented in Part 4, which favors consistently temperate locations.

This is the fifth post in my “Perfect Climate” series. To check out the first four, use the following links: The Perfect Climate – Part 1 The Perfect Climate – Part 2 The Perfect Climate – Part 3 The Perfect Climate – Part 4 Also check out Conroy’s Perfect Climate Rankings page.

 As a reminder, warm cities are places with annual mean temperatures in the mid to upper 70s (or higher) and little seasonal variance. Examples include Miami, Rio de Janeiro, and Bangalore, India. Temperate cities are places with annual mean temperatures in the mid 60s (no higher) and little seasonal variance, and especially no really hot months. Examples include San Diego, Mexico City, and Cape Town, South Africa. I’m presenting dual rankings because these preferences seem to predominate when it comes to climate taste. For both approaches, cold cities fare poorly.

One thing to note regarding the “warm cities” ranking, in my original formula I assumed that the higher the annual mean temperature the better. I was examining American cities the warmest of which is Honolulu, Hawaii with an annual mean of 77.5 degrees. However, when I expanded my rankings to encompass all the world’s cities, I ran into a problem: much of the Earth is very hot. Many cities across Africa and Asia have annual mean temperatures that exceed 80 degrees. While I enjoy warm conditions, even I have to admit that there’s an upper limit above which the climate grows too hot. I decided to modify my original formula to penalize cities where the annual mean temperature exceeds 78 degrees [2]. This adjustment works the same as the temperature penalty applied in the alternative (temperate) climate formula for cities with annual mean temperatures above 65 degrees (see Part 4).

The World’s Climate
Before jumping to the actual rankings, I'll note a few general impressions from my review of climates for hundreds of places in all parts of the world.

Latitude and elevation combine to give Nairobi a pleasant climate

• Large portions of South America, Africa, and Asia are located at low latitudes but relatively high elevations. This combination of tropical locations perched well above sea level is a magic formula for a favorable climate. The tropical latitude results in consistent solar radiation throughout the year, which means little temperature variance, but the higher elevations moderate the temperature. Cities in these zones include Nairobi, Sao Paulo, and Bangalore, India. Each boasts a climate that would be far hotter (and far less bearable) if located near sea level.
• It’s surprising how few large cities are located in really cold places. Only six cities experience mean low temperatures in the single digits (F) during one or more winter months: Minneapolis, Minnesota, Ottawa, Montreal, and Edmonton, Canada, and Shenyang and Harbin, China. Indeed, Harbin (China's tenth largest city), in the far northeast of China right on the edge of Siberia, is the only major global city to experience mean low temperatures below zero (F) for any month of the year. It’s appropriately nicknamed the “Ice City”, and the winter cold there is worse than in Arctic places like Nome, Alaska. This relative paucity of large cities in places with harsh winters is another demonstration that the great majority of people the world over choose not to live in cold climates.
• Conversely, cities with average high temperatures above 100 degrees during one or more summer months are common across the American southwest, Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The highest monthly mean temperature for any major city belongs to Baghdad, Iraq where the July high is a heat-stroke-inducing 111 degrees. That’s nearly as hot as Death Valley during high summer. Other "hot" cities include Phoenix, Riyadh, Delhi, and Khartoum. In fact, the capital of Sudan has the highest annual mean temperature of any major city at 85.8 degrees. (It's worth noting that I developed this climate system thinking of the U.S. where air conditioning is ubiquitous. That's certainly not the case through the "hot" world, so the warm rankings should be considered with that in mind; warm may not be so pleasant where it can't be escaped.)
• Perhaps the continent with the most consistently superb climate is South America. All of that continent’s major cities score well on both the warm and temperate rankings. And of all nations, Brazil’s big cities boast almost universally excellent climates. This is also true of the other large southern hemisphere country, Australia, where all of its large cities also have friendly climates. This is a major contrast to the large nations of the northern hemisphere that are either cold (Canada and Russia) or feature widely varying climates (U.S. and China).
• If you’re interested in finding unvarying temperatures, then follow the Equator. Quito, Ecuador, Manaus and Belem, Brazil, Male in the Maldives, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Brunei all lie on or near the Equator and are among the relatively short list of cities that have annual temperature variances of less than 3 degrees.
• Finally, it’s interesting to compare the most extreme climate on Earth to my climate rankings. Russia’s Vostok Station in Antarctica is renowned as the coldest place on the planet, the Pole of Cold [3]. The lowest ever measured surface temperature of -128.6 degrees was recorded there in 1983. The average August low temperature is -97 degrees, and it earns a climate score of -105. The temperatures at Vostok are comparable to the surface of Mars in winter. It puts things into perspective when evaluating the “perfect” and “terrible” climates across the globe. Harbin's climate is far closer to sunny Rio de Janeiro's than it is to interior Antarctica.

Ice sculptures in Harbin, the world's coldest big city

Now on to the rankings.

The Perfect Climate - Part 4

by Conroy

Do you prefer the weather of warm Miami or...

Ask yourself this question: What city has a better climate Miami or San Francisco? Anyone that’s read this blog and in particular my earlier posts analyzing “the perfect climate” will know that I favor the heat and sunshine of South Florida over the consistent cool of Northern California. However, I was in Florida last week, first in Orlando and then in Fort Lauderdale, and in keeping with what has been a remarkably warm 2012 for the eastern two-thirds of the United States, it was summer hot with highs at or above 90 and more humidity than is normal for early April. I was on vacation and glad for the summery temperatures [1], but as I sweated under the afternoon sun I did have to ask myself whether summer at Easter is really how I would define my perfect climate.

...temperate San Francisco?

And judging by the many comments I received on my three previous Perfect Climate posts, I’d say there is a strong sentiment regarding this topic. I defined what I considered the perfect climate, but many readers have different preferences (see a sampling of reader comments below).

This is the fourth post in my “Perfect Climate” series. To check out the first three, use the following links: The Perfect Climate – Part 1 The Perfect Climate – Part 2 The Perfect Climate – Part 3

Fortunately, one of the benefits of the climate ranking system I developed is that it can be adjusted for different tastes. I’d like to examine one such adjustment, one that addresses the question I posed at the beginning of this post. But first, a review of my ranking system.

Conroy’s Perfect Climate
Most people have their preferences for what makes a perfect climate, but as I explained in Part 1 I feel that temperature is the key factor and dominates humidity, and other elements like sunshine, wind, and precipitation. When it comes to temperature there are four variables to consider:

• mean annual temperature, the higher the better [2]; 
• the variance between the hottest month and the coldest month, the lower this difference (the less extreme the seasonality) the better [3]; 
• the mean temperature for each month of the year, the more “comfortable” the monthly mean the better (or stated another way: How comfortable is it at any given time of the year?) [4]; and 
• the mean diurnal temperature differences by month (the difference between daily high and low), the lower the better because a comfortable daily mean doesn’t mean much if actual daily temperatures vary greatly [5].

I use historical temperature data [6] for a city and apply it to a formula I developed [7] that yields a climate score [8]. The higher the climate score, the better the climate. I computed the score for nearly 500 places in the United States. The top three climate scores are associated with Hilo, Hawaii, Honolulu, and Key West. The three lowest scores belong to Nome, Fairbanks, and Barrow, Alaska. I doubt that many people would quibble with these results. The ranking of climate scores for the 30 largest U.S. metropolitan areas is provided in the table below. For a full discussion of how I used the four temperature variables to quantify the perfect climate, read The Perfect Climate – Part 1 post, and for commentary on the rankings see The Perfect Climate – Part 2.

Climate Rankings for the 30 Largest Metropolitan Areas
Rank	Metropolitan Area	Climate Score
1	Miami, FL	44.9
2	Tampa, FL	37.8
3	Los Angeles, CA	37.1
4	Orlando, FL	36.4
5	San Diego, CA	36.0
6	Houston, TX	29.5
7	San Francisco, CA	27.9
8	Riverside, CA	25.3
9	San Antonio, TX	23.9
10	Sacramento, CA	22.4
11	Phoenix, AZ	21.0
12	Dallas, TX	18.0
13	Atlanta, GA	16.6
14	Seattle, WA	14.2
15	Portland, OR	13.9
16	Las Vegas, NV	13.0
17	Baltimore, MD	9.9
18	Washington, DC	9.0
19	Philadelphia, PA	5.7
20	New York, NY	4.3
21	Cincinnati, OH	3.8
22	St. Louis, MO	3.6
23	Kansas City, MO	3.3
24	Boston, MA	2.5
25	Chicago, IL	1.3
26	Detroit, MI	0.1
27	Pittsburgh, PA	0.1
28	Cleveland, OH	-0.2
29	Denver, CO	-0.4
30	Minneapolis, MN	-12.6

Honolulu is the number 1 big city in my original rankings

After tweaking the formula, computing the climate scores, and analyzing the rankings, I was pleased. The rankings more or less reflected my view of the perfect climate. In particular, places in the hot and humid South and Southeast ranked high, as did temperate California, and then places in the baking Southwest. The lowest ranking places were (of course) freezing Alaska and the highly variable Northern Great Plains.

After I published these rankings I reviewed where Americans have chosen to live over the last half century and the results seem to validate my thinking. People prefer warm winters to cool summers. People will endure high summer heat to avoid freezing winter cold. See The Perfect Climate – Part 3 for more details on the correlation between climate and American demographic trends.

However, as pleased as I was at these results and despite how Americans seem to have (and continue to) vote with their feet for the climates they choose to live in, I received many critical comments on my system and the rankings, including:

“I see that San Diego rates really high, and having spent a lot of time in "America's Finest City", I can attest that it has an almost ideal climate. I much prefer the dryer conditions there than the sticky humidity in Florida.” – CT, Eugene, OR

“Wow! Having escaped Houston's oppressive humidity and 100º heat even in June for Denver's 300+ sunny days/year, I gotta pick my subjective observations over your methodology for picking a place to live!” – Nowitall, Denver, CO

“Ill have to be honest with you about the Florida climate. I've lived in Florida for about 12 years (in the Tampa area) and the climate is nothing to strive for. The summers are absolutely brutal. April- October you have to deal with temps above 90F with a lot of humidity. It’s not the heat as much as it is humidity. Every summer morning I always walk my dog. In the morning it’s about 86F with usually 90 percent humidity. 5 minutes outside and you’re pouring with sweat.” – Anonymous, Tampa